For context Poland under communism was the poorest country in the eastern block throughout 1946-89.
For the whole 20th century we were independent for 31 years.
In the last 229 years we were independent for 55 years
I think this often slips away people who complain that Poland receives so much in EU funding.
Nice to see Poland finnaly developing itself and not fighting for survival.
In my opinion, a big help is the landscape laws, which do not allow banners and advertisements to litter the space. Advertising pollution is definitely bad for people.
What less cars do to humans:
Livable and good looking cities
Grew up in Germany and went to study medicine in Wrocław. I remember before I left the amount of Germans/Brits who told me to “be careful” and “watch out” it for how backward and dangerous Poland is. Can confirm the poles aren’t the issue, loved it there and would happily go back if I was fluent enough to work there. Beautiful country and people tbh
This is the kind of restoration we need to see more of!
Promote that city planner
It’s weird how some people will lookbat the second picture and react *ewwww* because they won’t be able to drive a car through this as easily as they could and wont be able to park anywhere they want
That goes hard
The transformation Poland – and others – have been and are undergoing never ceases to uplift me. I still worry about even distribution of progress between rural and urban areas but still, its nothing short of amazing.
Is there a sub Reddit for stuff like this ?
This is a huge improvement
A thing which I don’t understand is why there is so little amount of green areas in pedestrian streets. I am not suggesting a green field, but something more than those bushes.
Wow amazing what lil yachty taking the wock to Poland did for the community
It’s not grey 👌
I wonder if the second picture is closer to what the buildings originally looked like? Perhaps they were old buildings damaged in the war and just “restored” enough to make them functional, because making them attractive cost too much.
i smell gentrification
It would be interesting to see how that building looked like back when it was errected.
Cheerful blue replaced by battleship grey.
Great the cars are gone, but why do architects still love battleship grey? Are they still scared of colours? It is such a lowest common denominator of a colour.
Beautiful transformation 10/10
This obvuiusly is a glowup, don’t get me wrong, but I really miss when Poles used to paint their buildings in vibrant colours. They always looked so nice in our depressing winters!
Glad to see that EU-money put to good use instead of lining the pockets of corrupt assholes like in Hungary.
Poland deserves a good time after the shitshow that was the last 200 years.
Loved visiting Lodz last year!
Trees! Woo!
This encouraged me to go for this kind of elevation for my 80s prl brick of a house 😂
What impressed me most was not the faсade, but what a large public space it had become. Widening the sidewalk is much more important.
This what the people in the EU want, but never what they get.
Where did that fully grown tree come from?…
Haha gentrification goes brrrrrr…
How come Poland beats my homeland Czechia in virtually every aspect?
It’s beautiful but I guess that’s what people would mean when talking about gentrification. Hopefully those people who lives there can still afford to live there. The pessimism in me sees some corporation has bought the block, did the upgrades and now rents it out for outrageous amounts
Are these type of roads good for cars overall?
The lower picture looks more like Paris than Lodz. And it’s interesting.
Nice to see that beautiful architecture is still being built👏
I love when they add vegetation
I like it. Here in Germany we had old buildings that looked like the bottom one but were transformed in something soulless like the building at the top.
This is so perfect 👏🏻😍
Fuck cars!
I actually used to live just a block from this very junction.
A short history of the neighbourhood: both streets (Wschodnia and Włókiennicza – meaning the “Eastern” and -roughly- “Textile” streets) are located close to the very center of Łódź, and just a few years ago used to be really rough. In the 90s they were a slum, Włókiennicza (the woonerf one) especially, it had so bad rep even people from the neighbourhood didn’t dare to wander there. Tl;dr, Łódź Downtown (Śródmieście) along with the infamous Bałuty as well as Chojny and some other districts used to be places where the “lower classes” lived during the textile boom that started in the 19th century and contunued till the 1980s or so. Some streets, like both Wschodnia and Włókiennicza, used to be ‘worse’ than others – while most people there were working class, there were some entrenched almost ‘clans’ of people that lived on the borders of society, frequently with criminal background. The dirstrict used to be poor, dirty and badly maintained, which is a shame as many tenement houses (“kamienice”) were very beautiful.
This started to change in the 00s when Poland started to be more prosperous and change culturally – things like being drunk, littering and vandalism started to be increasingly frowned upon. The change of this particular place accelerated in the 2010s when the city council decided to revitalise the whole district – residents were resettled, usually to places with way better living conditions (in the 90s and 00s many of those buildings had communal toilets and no central heating, which contributed to awful smog) and started to renovate the place.
As for what happens now, I don’t know – maybe it will become a ‘normal’, if a little posh district, maybe an airbnb tourist trap. Probably somewhere in between as Łódź is not a tourist spot.
Oh shit wow
The streets look great, however I take issue with the building on the corner, where someone has transformed a really nice Bauhaus style functionalist building (in need of maintenance) into a building in a phony 1910’s architectural style.
46 comments
We need more of this!
When the EU funds start trickling down
Czechs need to see this
now this is what I call a glow up
Crying in Romania.
For context Poland under communism was the poorest country in the eastern block throughout 1946-89.
For the whole 20th century we were independent for 31 years.
In the last 229 years we were independent for 55 years
I think this often slips away people who complain that Poland receives so much in EU funding.
Nice to see Poland finnaly developing itself and not fighting for survival.
In my opinion, a big help is the landscape laws, which do not allow banners and advertisements to litter the space. Advertising pollution is definitely bad for people.
What less cars do to humans:
Livable and good looking cities
Grew up in Germany and went to study medicine in Wrocław. I remember before I left the amount of Germans/Brits who told me to “be careful” and “watch out” it for how backward and dangerous Poland is. Can confirm the poles aren’t the issue, loved it there and would happily go back if I was fluent enough to work there. Beautiful country and people tbh
This is the kind of restoration we need to see more of!
Promote that city planner
It’s weird how some people will lookbat the second picture and react *ewwww* because they won’t be able to drive a car through this as easily as they could and wont be able to park anywhere they want
That goes hard
The transformation Poland – and others – have been and are undergoing never ceases to uplift me. I still worry about even distribution of progress between rural and urban areas but still, its nothing short of amazing.
Is there a sub Reddit for stuff like this ?
This is a huge improvement
A thing which I don’t understand is why there is so little amount of green areas in pedestrian streets. I am not suggesting a green field, but something more than those bushes.
Wow amazing what lil yachty taking the wock to Poland did for the community
It’s not grey 👌
I wonder if the second picture is closer to what the buildings originally looked like? Perhaps they were old buildings damaged in the war and just “restored” enough to make them functional, because making them attractive cost too much.
i smell gentrification
It would be interesting to see how that building looked like back when it was errected.
[This works the opposite way in Finland ](https://media2.riemurasia.net/albumit/mmedia/lp/8kv/hggt/3175/1935920927.jpg)
Cheerful blue replaced by battleship grey.
Great the cars are gone, but why do architects still love battleship grey? Are they still scared of colours? It is such a lowest common denominator of a colour.
Beautiful transformation 10/10
This obvuiusly is a glowup, don’t get me wrong, but I really miss when Poles used to paint their buildings in vibrant colours. They always looked so nice in our depressing winters!
Glad to see that EU-money put to good use instead of lining the pockets of corrupt assholes like in Hungary.
Poland deserves a good time after the shitshow that was the last 200 years.
Loved visiting Lodz last year!
Trees! Woo!
This encouraged me to go for this kind of elevation for my 80s prl brick of a house 😂
What impressed me most was not the faсade, but what a large public space it had become. Widening the sidewalk is much more important.
This what the people in the EU want, but never what they get.
Where did that fully grown tree come from?…
Haha gentrification goes brrrrrr…
How come Poland beats my homeland Czechia in virtually every aspect?
[Theoooooo](https://youtu.be/NVHvUT9lMjs?si=3QVI66y5QI-iBeKM)
It’s beautiful but I guess that’s what people would mean when talking about gentrification. Hopefully those people who lives there can still afford to live there. The pessimism in me sees some corporation has bought the block, did the upgrades and now rents it out for outrageous amounts
Are these type of roads good for cars overall?
The lower picture looks more like Paris than Lodz. And it’s interesting.
Nice to see that beautiful architecture is still being built👏
I love when they add vegetation
I like it. Here in Germany we had old buildings that looked like the bottom one but were transformed in something soulless like the building at the top.
This is so perfect 👏🏻😍
Fuck cars!
I actually used to live just a block from this very junction.
A short history of the neighbourhood: both streets (Wschodnia and Włókiennicza – meaning the “Eastern” and -roughly- “Textile” streets) are located close to the very center of Łódź, and just a few years ago used to be really rough. In the 90s they were a slum, Włókiennicza (the woonerf one) especially, it had so bad rep even people from the neighbourhood didn’t dare to wander there. Tl;dr, Łódź Downtown (Śródmieście) along with the infamous Bałuty as well as Chojny and some other districts used to be places where the “lower classes” lived during the textile boom that started in the 19th century and contunued till the 1980s or so. Some streets, like both Wschodnia and Włókiennicza, used to be ‘worse’ than others – while most people there were working class, there were some entrenched almost ‘clans’ of people that lived on the borders of society, frequently with criminal background. The dirstrict used to be poor, dirty and badly maintained, which is a shame as many tenement houses (“kamienice”) were very beautiful.
This started to change in the 00s when Poland started to be more prosperous and change culturally – things like being drunk, littering and vandalism started to be increasingly frowned upon. The change of this particular place accelerated in the 2010s when the city council decided to revitalise the whole district – residents were resettled, usually to places with way better living conditions (in the 90s and 00s many of those buildings had communal toilets and no central heating, which contributed to awful smog) and started to renovate the place.
As for what happens now, I don’t know – maybe it will become a ‘normal’, if a little posh district, maybe an airbnb tourist trap. Probably somewhere in between as Łódź is not a tourist spot.
Oh shit wow
The streets look great, however I take issue with the building on the corner, where someone has transformed a really nice Bauhaus style functionalist building (in need of maintenance) into a building in a phony 1910’s architectural style.